EBSCO’s History Reference Center andProQuest’s History Study Center Workshop

I Introduction

The EBSCO company has been around for many decades. They are known for publishing some of the best library reference resources in the business. In the 1980’s they went online with their reference resources. They produce InfoTrac which is used by academic and public libraries around the world. GPHS has a database subscription to several of their databases. One of these databases is History Reference Center.

ProQuest started out putting together a database for thousands of newspaper and magazines publications back in the 1990s. This online database has replaced the need for students to learn how to manually locate articles for their research assignments using the Abridged Readers Guide to Periodical Literature. Over time ProQuest has expanded its database offerings for students to use when conducting research. One of these databases is the History Study Center. Today, we are going to explore both databases.

You can access all our Premium Databases at GPHS through the LMC’s Online Resources link on the LMC home page.

Once you are on the Online Resources page, click on the Premium Databases to open the dropdown menu.

II EBSCO’s History Reference Center

From the Premium Databases’ dropdown menu, you will see PowerPoint (PPT) presentations for several EBSCO databases. One of these PPTs is for the History Reference Center. You can use this PPT to show students how this database works. But for today’s workshop please click on the EBSCO Databases link.

Your students will be sent to the EBSCO login screen. The User ID for this database is _____________________ and the password is _______________________ .

The next screen is a listing of all the EBSCO databases we have at GPHS. Click on the History Reference Center link to access this database.

The home page for History Reference Center has several main features. In the upper left hand corner of the window there is a basic search window as well as a link to the Advanced Search window. The database is split between U. S. History and World History, so students may focus on their field of study. In addition, there is a Browse Popular Sources, Reference Shelf, and Feature History Topic students can use when searching for social studies information.

Let’s look at the Advanced Search window.

The advanced search allows students to limit their searches by search modes, full text, published dates, publications, number of pages, timeline, peer review, Lexile reading scores (good for students with struggle with reading), and PDF full text. You might want

to play with these features to see how they impact searches in your course. However, let go back to the home page and click on U. S. History.

Students can either search by text in the search window, or browse through the historical era they are conducting for their research project. Notice the Reference Shelf and Featured History Topic are available for students to access.

For today’s workshop let’s type in “World War 1.” As you start typing in the search window you will get a dropdown menu listing several different topics starting with the word, “world.” When you select “World War 1 the result page list the first 10 of 5,306 articles on World War 1.

You may limit the number of results by selecting only Full Text, Peer Reviewed, Cover Story, Publication Date, and/or Source Types.

When you click on an article, the database gives the reader bibliographic information and most times an abstract of the article along with the full text. History Reference Center also allows the patron to listen to an audio recording of the article. Other tools in History Reference Center are saving the article to a folder for future access, print, e-mail, or save the article, create notes while reading the article, create a link to the article, and share the article with others. There is a Google Classroom link as well, but our District isn’t using this technology tool.

Lastly, when the student clicks on the Cite link it pops up a menu with several different citation formats. APA format is easily seen in the popup window. However, students will need to scroll down the menu to locate MLA citations. Currently, EBSCO’s databases are still using the MLA, 7th edition tools.

III History Study Center

ProQuest’s History Study Center link is located under the Premium Databases dropdown menu. In addition, to the link that takes the students to the database there is link to a PDF Quick Start Guide, and a two-minute training video you can use in the classroom.

The History Study Center is a collection of primary and secondary sources on global history. The home page of the History Study Center has your regular search window, where you can search the entire database.

Or, you can browse each of the five major content areas (e.g., Study Units, Historical Documents, Maps & Reference, Multimedia, and Journals). Today, we are going to browse through Study Units. Below is the home page for Study Units, and we will browse American History for units on World War 1.

After browsing through several windows, narrowing our search to World War 1, we come to this window listing all the information they have on the study unit on an introduction to the history of the first World War, 1914-1918.

This web page has a long listing of articles starting with articles covering the highlights of this period in American history. However, students can jump through the list by clicking on the Jump to categories, which include timelines, topic overviews, references, biographies, historiographies, maps, primary sources, images, videos, journal articles, web links and related study units.

When a student clicks on an article it takes them to a page with bibliographic information, links to email or save the article, to cite the article and a link to the Open PDF document.

When clicking on the Open PDF document link the student see a photographic reproduction of the original journal pages. Some of these articles can be difficult to read.

Lastly, if the student wants to use this article in their paper, they can click on the “Cite this link to bring up the citation in MLA 7th edition format.

To edit this citation the student can click Show edit citation form to format in APA style.